Truck festival

Tuesday 22 July 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Tuesday 22 July 2008 19.01 EDT

In 1998, Robin Bennett, a music-loving teenager from the Oxfordshire village of Steventon, asked a local farmer if he could put on "a bit of a gig" to celebrate his 20th birthday with 150 friends. Thus, Truck festival was born. A decade on, Bennett is celebrating his 30th birthday surrounded by 6,000 punters. But the biggest cause for celebration was the weekend's glorious weather - particularly as last year's festival was flooded by torrential rain, something they weren't insured for.

Run for charity, with the local vicar dishing out ice-cream and the Rotary Club handling the catering, Truck is that rarest of events: one where you feel more like a guest than a customer. Sadly, nobody communicated that message to the Lemonheads' frontman, Evan Dando. Headlining Saturday's indie-centric main stage bill, Dando delivered a bizarrely curmudgeonly performance, rattling through the band's slacker-pop canon without pausing between songs, let alone addressing the weekend's biggest crowd. "I thought Evan Dando was extremely rude last night," declared Magic Numbers frontman Romeo Stodart, playing an unannounced acoustic set in a tiny marquee on Sunday afternoon. "He just didn't seem like he wanted to be here."

That left Dando in the minority. From the beaming faces of the lush, of-the-moment indie-folk acts Noah and the Whale, Le Volume Courbe and Laura Marling, to the ecstatic fist-pumping of the returning acid-house heroes Altern-8, it looked like playing Truck was as enjoyable as attending it.